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Experts Wolfgang Gruel and Frank Piller expanded on their research into new business models within transportation ecosystems.

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Webinar presenters Wolfgang Gruel and Frank Piller are both experts in how big systems can be customized for large numbers of people.

“Intermodal routing is nothing new,” write Wolfgang Gruel and Frank Piller in “A New Vision for Personal Transportation,” their article in the Winter 2016 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. “It simply means you’re using more than one mode of transportation — car, bus, bike, walking, train, subway, plane, or anything else — on a given route.”

What is new, though, are advancements that enable intermodal routing to be realized on a large scale and in real time.

In a free webinar “Leveraging Smart Data and Internet of Things to Realize Mass Customization” on February 5th at 1:00 pm ET, Gruel and Piller discussed the examples and themes set forth in their article. As they write: “To provide customers with a seamless experience that includes not just planning, but traveling itself, these independent systems will have to adopt a more holistic perspective. They will have to find a way to combine planning, integrated usage, pricing, and payment, all of which is easier said than done.“ Gruel and Piller expanded on the suggestions their article offers in their presentation and Q&A session.

Wolfgang Gruel is a former researcher with the MIT Media Lab, currently with moovel GmbH, a Daimler subsidiary that produces a smartphone app that helps users plan travel routes. Frank Piller is codirector of the MIT Smart Customization Group and a professor of technology and innovation management at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany. Michael Fitzgerald, a contributing editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, will moderate the discussion and Q&A.